The Great Utah Ski. Day One

Americans do breakfast. When I say do, I mean DO. They must guffaw into their tiny china hotel teacups when they are offered a Full English and rightly ask, ‘where’s the rest of it?’ This morning as I helped myself to the bulging platters at our Utah hotel, I didn’t have seconds, I had thirds.

Yesterday was a long day, 16 hours of flying, faffing and eating terrible food. Memo to Delta – whoever thinks up your menus, sack them, NOW, just get the breakfast paninis from Starbuck’s, they’ll do for all your meals – with blueberry muffins for pudding. But today, well today was another day.

There wasn’t a cloud in the ski, not even a contrail. The view we could see from the breakfast table was snow, deep and crisp and uneven. The view inside was mountains of bacon, sausage, corned beef hash, eggs, pancakes, oatmeal, muffins, cereals, fruit and jelly. I am now convinced jelly goes with anything. Oh happy day, a third helping certainly set me up for a day on the slopes. Noel had only had seconds, though his plate was piled higher both times.

The US is suffering unseasonable cold; here in Park City today it was minus 25C. If you want to know how cold that is, think how long it would take to take your shoes off and put on ski boots, in less than that time I lost all feeling in my hands. Still, every cloud, as they saying goes and we HAD to have coffee, which was the silver lining which warmed us up until we got on the Slowest Lift in the World. The day was punctuated with warming-up stops. No wonder we were about the only ones on the mountain. Still, a good first day, and it will be warmer tomorrow, a mere minus 10C.